


See New Things In My Soul

by idiotbrothers



Category: Machine Gun Kelly (Musician)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst, Catharsis, Emotional Baggage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Enemies to Lovers, Established Relationship, M/M, Mutual Pining, POV Kells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 00:13:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28325874
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idiotbrothers/pseuds/idiotbrothers
Summary: There's more to it than just sex, but neither one of them knows what to do about that.
Relationships: Colson Baker | Machine Gun Kelly/Eminem
Comments: 8
Kudos: 44





	See New Things In My Soul

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a line from "The Void" by Kid Cudi.
> 
> RPF Disclaimer: This is fake and just for fun.

“How long are we gonna keep doing this?” Colson asks, hating how petulant his voice sounds.  
  
He’s naked under the sheets of their hotel bed, and Em is quickly getting dressed across from him, yanking his clothes on with such force that it’s like he’s angry. _Is_ he angry? Colson stares at him harder, considering.  
  
“As long as I fuckin’ want us to,” Em snaps, distractedly grasping for his phone and keys on the nightstand.  
  
“Why’re you pissed at me?” Colson can’t help but ask, the petulance in his tone intensifying. He’s starting to have a hard time rationalizing the cold front that always sweeps over Em as soon as their afterglow fades. It’s maybe starting to hurt a little. The dissonance between Em stuttering mindless praise into Colson’s skin as he fucks into him with rough, desperate thrusts; his fingers in Colson’s mouth, his teeth at his earlobe and his throat and his nipples… Between _that_ , and Em practically throwing himself across the room once he comes back down to Earth, his eyes dark with something like hatred… Well, it’s sort of twisting Colson up inside.  
  
“I’m not - ” Em barks, then stops to scrub a hand over his cropped hair, his eyes flickering shut for a couple of seconds. “New rule,” Em says, sticking his phone and keys in his pocket and bending to look Colson in the face, gold chain around his neck swinging, “We don’t talk. Ever.” In a terribly uncharacteristic move, he presses a featherlight kiss to Colson’s forehead, avoiding his eyes afterward.  
  
Dazed, Colson watches as Em turns and stomps out of the room, slamming the door behind him as he goes.  
  
 _Huh. Okay._  
  
The spot on his forehead that Em’s lips touched fizzes faintly, and Colson rubs at it, feeling lost. He sighs, and sweeps his hand over the nightstand in search of his phone, checking inside the little drawer when that fails to turn it up. He finds it resting inside, and raises it to his face, awakening the lock screen to check his notifications.  
  
And that’s when he promptly realizes that this isn’t his phone. It’s Em’s. The couple of business-related texts he reads on the screen are evidence enough of that. Colson presses on the home button, and his stomach jumps when the phone unlocks easily.  
  
 _No passcode? C’mon, old man._  
  
The first thing he does is pull up his number in Em’s contacts (which, annoyingly, is named “punkass”) and send a text that reads, _hey this is kells. u took my phone on accident_. As undeniably curious as he is, he’s not a goddamn snoop. The second thing he does is open the camera, planning to leave some kind of intentionally aggravating selfie for Em to stumble across later.  
  
He’s distracted from his mission by the thumbnail of Em’s most recently taken photo at the bottom left hand corner of the screen, because it sort of looks like…  
  
He taps into the photo, and realizes with a shock that his suspicions were correct. It’s a picture of his own sleeping face, taken from up close. According to the timestamp, it was taken last Friday at around 2 AM. Colson remembers, then, that Em hadn’t left the hotel that night, had made a grumbling show of acquiescing to Colson’s request that he stay for once. He’d slept on the couch as opposed to sharing a bed with him, but he _had_ stayed, stone-faced and silent as Colson talked his ear off, happy to have gotten his way and pleasantly high on endorphins and the edibles he’d taken prior to their hookup. Colson’s cheeks heat up at the memory, and at the sheer defenselessness of his face in the photo; the almost girly length of his eyelashes, his bare shoulders limned in warm lamplight.  
  
His heart thudding, he swipes to the previous photo, unable to silence his brain’s insistent demands that he check _just in case_. This one, too, is a photo of Colson - a blurry candid shot of him laughing with his head thrown back, his arm braced against the headboard of another nondescript hotel bed. He has no idea how Em managed to take that without him noticing.  
  
The photo before that is a screenshot of an email from a doctor that Colson quickly skips over the second he registers it, but the one before _that_ is a professional shot of Colson mid-performance that Em must have downloaded from somewhere. He’s shirtless in the photo, and very clearly pouring his heart out; hunched over his microphone like it’s the only thing tethering him to his body, sweat glistening on every visible inch of his skin under the alien glow of the stage lights, his expression utterly agonized.  
  
Colson sets the phone down, tears threatening at the corners of his eyes and an aching pressure building up in his chest. He’s seen enough.  
  
It’s then that the door to the room swings open and Em staggers in, looking stricken. “Give me my - ”  
  
“Yeah,” Colson croaks, holding up Em’s phone and letting him snatch it away.  
  
Em returns Colson’s own phone to him, then says, with an edge of paranoia to his voice, “Why’re you looking at me like that?”  
  
“I… I didn’t mean to,” Colson starts, sounding distressingly quavery, “but I saw… your, uh. Your pics.”  
  
Em stares blankly at him for a moment, and Colson can tell exactly when he understands what Colson is admitting to, because a slow-burning _rage_ transforms his features into a mask of hostility, and his hands form into fists at his sides.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Colson babbles instinctively, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I really didn’t mean - ”  
  
“Please stop talking,” Em says tightly, closing his eyes. “I need… a minute.”  
  
Colson clamps his mouth shut, and sits shivering at the edge of the bed, tears spilling down his cheeks as the pressure in his chest splits down the middle with a jagged flash of pain. He digs his knuckles against his mouth to stifle a sob, out of his mind with anxiety.  
  
Em opens his eyes, his frown softening incrementally into one of concern, his hands jerking up in an automatic, aborted movement. “The fuck’re you crying for?” The words themselves are harsh, but his voice isn’t - he sounds more confused than anything.  
  
“I don’t _know_ ,” Colson says, except it comes out sounding like a wail, and that makes him feel even worse.  
  
Em sits stiffly next to him on the bed, silent and still for a beat until he puts his arm around Colson’s shoulders. Colson is weeping openly now, his tears staining the fabric of Em’s shirt as he turns into him, gasping and hiccupping like a fucking child.  
  
“I’m not pissed at you, y’know,” Em says, heartbreakingly soft like Colson has never heard him sound before, no trace of anger left in his voice.  
  
“Y-y-you’re not?”  
  
“Nah. Never.” He pauses, then amends, “Okay, obviously not _never_. You’re an insufferable little shit.”  
  
Colson makes a noise that’s halfway to a laugh, palming at his wet face.  
  
“But,” Em continues, “when I get all, um. Quiet and… homicidal-like. When we’re together. That’s not on account of you, it’s on account of _me_.”  
  
Colson pulls back slightly to make eye contact, and Em brushes away the wetness on his cheeks, his index finger lingering on the pad of Colson’s bottom lip.  
  
“I shouldn’t’ve looked,” Colson says, and means it.  
  
Em shakes his head. “There’s a lot of things _I_ shouldn’t have done. I just… don’t know how to deal with it sometimes. Makes me crazy. _Crazier_.”  
  
Colson blinks tearfully at him. “Deal with…?”  
  
Em kisses him, deep and intense and his tongue is in Colson’s mouth and his fingers are in Colson’s hair and all his worries are temporarily frozen in place because this isn’t something they just _do_ , not like this. Not without the brilliant blaze of sexual climax blocking out all rational thought or the violent intimacy of a physical fight blurring the lines between loathing and lust.  
  
Colson kisses him back, putting every passionate feeling he has into it, all the admiration and longing and uncertainty and regret, so much regret he could drown in it forever.  
  
“Jesus,” Em gasps once they break apart, his eyes glazed and his mouth worn and slick with Colson’s spit, his chest heaving. “I’ve never… You’re… ”  
  
Colson wraps his arms around him and tucks his face into the crook of his neck, breathing unevenly. He can’t look at him right now, or he might start crying again. This man whose music he’d once used as a lifeline, whose words were cruelly gleaming knives he could stock in his survival arsenal, until those knives were turned on him. And here they are years and years later, molded together, and he is inconceivably breakable in Colson’s arms; unraveled by his kiss and emotionally adrift.  
  
“Me too,” Colson forces himself to say, around the lump in his throat, “Me too, Marshall.” 

**Author's Note:**

> Fun fact: I wrote this as part of a collection of brief (and mostly fluffy) emgk one-shots I'm working on, but it ended up so gratuitously angsty that I wanted to post it as a standalone. I guess I was in a _mood_. 
> 
> If you liked it, you can check out my full-length emgk fic _[Death Threats as Love Letters](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27566776)_. I spent a looong time writing that one, so I gotta plug it.


End file.
